Do you face book?

It's a great little internet application... if used correctly and within its purpose.
Or, are you one of those people that chase werewolves, bite zombies, hatch eggs, aquariums, gardens, secret crush links, "send this to 5 friends or your world will cave in" chain mail crap and have a collection of faces you really don't know... well, you might need to be a little careful.

Think about this from Wired this week:

Some Facebook users checking their accounts Wednesday found odd postings of messages on their "wall" from one of their friends, saying: "lol i can't believe these pics got posted.... it's going to be BADDDD when her boyfriend sees these," followed by what looks like a genuine Facebook link.

But the link leads to a fake Facebook login page hosted on a Chinese .cn domain. The fake page actually logs the victims into Facebook, but also keeps a copy of their user names and passwords.

You wouldn't even know your details were stolen because some tricky little code has also logged you back into Facebook. Ok, so that one might catch out some less than savvy users. Are you savvy? Do you add silly applications without checking them out? Maybe you have some little Facebook add-on like "someone thinks your hot" or "someone has a crush on you..."

As detailed by Fortinet, Zango is being distributed via "Secret Crush," an application that tells Facebook members that one of their friends has a crush on them and then leads users through a series of screens to find out more information. At one point, users are told that they must provide the names of five friends to continue.

Finally, Facebook members are taken to a page where they can download a "crush calculator" that's bundled with Zango's ad-serving software, which trails people as they surf the Web and serves them pop-up ads. That last page discloses that Zango will serve users ads based on the pages they visit online.

Here's my take... I've started researching these things. I added one to my Facebook and have been testing it. Some people really don't have any idea what information they're giving away for free.

As a manager of a team of developers, we've been looking closely at Facebook and developing some little Facebook applications for work which we will soon release online. Did you know that by adding just one of these little applications you'll be letting us in on a few little secrets? Oh, and we'll also know about your friends too.